Celebrating Fifteen Years Of No One Lives Forever

On 9 November 2000, the saga of superspy Cate Archer kicked off with the release of The Operative: No One Lives Forever. What followed was a thrilling spy adventure spanning two awesome stealth first-person-shooters (and one straight-up shooter, with a different protagonist, that nobody really talks about).

As Cate Archer, you'd carry out various missions across the globe, utilising stealth or brute force to infiltrate, well, anything. Like a German research facility and a space station in No One Lives Forever, or a tornado-stricken trailer park and an underwater base in the sequel.

They were quite the games! A real shame you can't easily buy them today, with the series' rights sitting in a publisher's filing cabinet somewhere, untouched. Night Dive Studios, a team specializing in updating older games for modern systems, tried to re-release No One Lives Forever -- only for the project to be shut down because they couldn't secure the rights to the games.

I sincerely hope that by the time of NOLF's 20th birthday (or earlier, preferably), all of that will be in the past and the series will be out on digital distribution for everyone to enjoy. For now, here's a bit of gaming nostalgia with the first game's intro:

While the NOLF games were great, and had (arguably still have) a loyal following, the games are just old enough that if you were to ask the next person your age on the street if they've ever heard about NOLF, they'd probably say they've never heard of it. I mean, even back in the early 2000's, I think it even had trouble getting out from under the shadows of other FPS's of that gaming era.... it was arguably obscure in comparison. Still.... if they (Night Dive Studios) couldn't get the rights to the games, what about making something else based off of Cate Archer? Or, even if not Cate Archer.... how about a different UNITY agent? Novels... a film... a TV series... maybe a web series? Something.... ANYTHING! You know.... build up interest for the story and the whole NOLF universe, then perhaps the company or companies who are hiding their papers (documenting their ownership of the I.P.) will finally see the potential of the game and of the franchise. In turn, that could be an indirect method of paving the way for Cate Archer's return........ in some form or other; be it a re-master of the original games, a complete reboot, or even NOLF 3.